Every March 8th, the world is filled with glossy campaigns, urging them to “accelerate action” and “absorb inspiration.” International Women’s Day has become a sophisticated and popular sight where corporate sponsors preach empowerment, while women in need of solidarity are protected for themselves.
I hope this year’s call for “accelerated action” means not only women who fit neatly into corporate feminism, media-friendly activism, and elite success stories, but all women.
But when history is a guide, the only action to accelerate is branding feminism as a marketable commodity.
Every year, International Women’s Day is paraded as a global moment of solidarity, but its priorities are carefully curated. Feminist institutions are behind the engaging, media-friendly, politically convenient causes that can surround women’s struggles as individual success stories, rather than systemic injustice.
They met widespread Western support when Iranian women protested and burned their hijabs. When Ukrainian women acquired weapons, they were welcomed as symbols of resilience. However, when a Palestinian woman excavates a tile rub and pulls the child’s body from the ruins of the house, they meet silence or even worse, doubt. The same feminist institutions that mobilize against “violence against women” have struggled to utter the words “Gaza” or “genocide.”
In the UK, in preparation for this year’s International Women’s Day, MPs and feminist organizations held an event called “Give a voice to women who have been silent in Afghanistan.” Of course, that’s because it’s the way you take on the Taliban.
This is what passes for international solidarity. It is a symbolic gesture that does nothing for women suffering under oppressive regimes, but makes Western politicians feel morally superior.
Let me be clear: Afghan women deserve solidarity and support of every ounce. Their struggle against a oppressive regime is realistic, urgent, and devastating. And yes, what they endure is gender apartheid.
But acknowledging their suffering does not excuse the hypocrisy of the ranks of those who make feminism a political tool. Afghan women appear silently to Palestinian women who are starving, bombed and brutal in front of us.
The rise of the Taliban was not a natural act, but a direct product of British and American interventions. After 20 years of occupation, after returning Afghan women to the very western men who once armed them to make possible, these same voices now weep at their fate.
Where were these female lawmakers, well-known feminists, and mainstream feminist organizations when pregnant Palestinian women were giving birth on the streets of Gaza due to hospital bombing? Where was the protest when Israeli snipers targeted female journalists like Shireen Abu Akure? Where was the boycott when a Palestinian girl was pulled out of the tiled bleed house where she was killed by a US-made bomb?
Again and again, we see the same pattern. Feminist anger is conditional, activism is selective, and solidarity is secured for those who do not challenge Western powers. Women in Afghanistan deserve support. But so are Palestinian women, Sudanese women and Yemeni women. Instead, their suffering is filled with silence, doubt, or complete elimination.
International Women’s Day, once a fundamental call for equality, has become a hollow view. Feminist organizations and politicians choose women who deserve justice, and choose which women can be sacrificeed on the altar of Western interest.
Feminism has long been carried out by powerful people as tools to justify empires, wars and occupations. During the Algerian War of Independence, the French launched a campaign to “liberate” Algerian women from the veil, parading women in propaganda rituals while simultaneously brutally raping them in detention centres.
The French, of course, were not concerned about gender equality in Algeria. They easily restricted the education and employment of women in Algeria. Their actions under the attire of helping women were about domination.
This same story of a helpless brown woman in need of a white savior has been used to justify more recent Western military interventions, from Afghanistan to Iraq. Today we are looking at the same playbook in Palestine.
The West frames Palestinian women as victims, but not bombs, displacements or starvation. No, it is said that the real problem is Palestinian men. Israeli officials and their western allies rehash the same Orientalist rope. Palestinian women must be saved from their culture and from their people.
The systematic genocide of women and children is treated as an unfortunate footnote to conflict, rather than its central atrocities. We see the same pattern over and over again. Concerns about women’s rights are only silent when it serves political agenda and when those rights are crushed under the weight of Western-backed airstrikes and military occupation. This is not solidarity. He is an accomplice surrounded by feminist rhetoric.
So who will actually benefit from International Women’s Day this year? Are women who allow oppression to fit the story of Western feminist sects and allow politicians, feminist organizations and mainstream women’s advocacy groups to bask in the glow of their self-conditions? Or perhaps a woman who has been silent, erased, dehumanized. Does a woman who “accelerates action” mean 17 months of genocide and 76 settler colonial violence?
Is this another “comfortable” exercise that can be argued to support women all over the world without facing the fact that feminism is limited? If this is really about accelerated action, then we should hear them end up supporting Palestinian women after 17 months of bombing, hunger and evacuation.
But we know what this will turn out. Speeches are given, hashtags are trending, and panel discussions are held, but Gaza women remain buried under the tiled rub, making it inconvenient to mention politically inconvenient their suffering.
As for me, I am participating in today’s feminist movement march, but let’s make it clear, our agenda is not the same. I march for all Palestinian women who are not only struggling to hear, as she is broadcast for blind and deaf ears in Genocide, but are also extremely cruelly dehumanized.
I consider each mother hugging the child’s unvigorated body, along with countless other women who refuse to remain silent. Each daughter is forced to become caretakers overnight, with each sister searching for the tile rub with her bare hands. And we – women who believe in true feminist solidarity and reject selective anger, do not simply “hope” that this call to action means something. Make sure you do so.
Let the voices of Palestinians be heard. We will boycott those who benefit from Palestinian oppression. We challenge all platforms and all feminists who normalize the suffering of Palestinians and hold them accountable for their accomplices.
To our Palestinian Sisters: We feel your pain. We have been holding your struggle in our hearts for the past 17 months, but we know that your fight didn’t start there.
And know this: next year, March 8th, we will not only lament your suffering. We celebrate your victory. Liberation from colonial occupation of the settlers, rather than so-called “liberation” from your men, as Western feminists like to frame it. We hear you. We will meet you. And we will not rest until the whole world does.
The views expressed in this article are the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.